A personal blog by a graying (mostly Anglo with light African-American roots) gay leftist leaning liberal progressive fit married college-educated former Baha'i NPR-listening Professor Emeritus now following the Dharma from California to Minas Gerais, Brasil.

Friday, October 7, 2016

Via Lions Roar: Life is Tough. Here Are Six Ways to Deal With It

An ancient set of Buddhist slogans offers us six powerful techniques
to transform life’s difficulties into awakening and benefit. Zen
teacher Norman Fischer guides us through them. Illustrations by Keith
Abbott.

There’s an old Zen saying: the whole world’s upside down. In other
words, the way the world looks from the ordinary or conventional point
of view is pretty much the opposite of the way the world actually is.
There’s a story that illustrates this.

Once there was a Zen master who was called Bird’s Nest Roshi because
he meditated in an eagle’s nest at the top of a tree. He became quite
famous for this precarious practice. The Song Dynasty poet Su Shih (who
was also a government official) once came to visit him and, standing on
the ground far below the meditating master, asked what possessed him to
live in such a dangerous manner. The roshi answered, “You call this
dangerous? What you are doing is far more dangerous!” Living normally in
the world, ignoring death, impermanence, and loss and suffering, as we
all routinely do, as if this were a normal and a safe way to live, is
actually much more dangerous than going out on a limb to meditate.While trying to avoid difficulty may be natural and understandable,
it actually doesn’t work. We think it makes sense to protect ourselves
from pain, but our self-protection ends up causing us deeper pain. We
think we have to hold on to what we have, but our very holding on causes
us to lose what we have. We’re attached to what we like and try to
avoid what we don’t like, but we can’t keep the attractive object and we
can’t avoid the unwanted object. So, counterintuitive though it may be,
avoiding life’s difficulties is actually not the path of least
resistance; it is a dangerous way to live. If you want to have a full
and happy life, in good times and bad, you have to get used to the idea
that facing misfortune squarely is better than trying to escape from it.

This is not a matter of grimly focusing on life’s difficulties. It is
simply the smoothest possible approach to happiness. Of course, when we
can prevent difficulty, we do it. The world may be upside down, but we
still have to live in this upside-down world, and we have to be
practical on its terms. The teaching on transforming bad circumstances
into the path doesn’t deny that. What it addresses is the underlying
attitude of anxiety, fear, and narrow-mindedness that makes our lives
unhappy, fearful, and small.

Transforming bad circumstances into the path is associated with the
practice of patience. There are six mind-training (lojong) slogans
connected with this: